Here is a story that might make you think twice about carrying a drive home each day. The story itself is quite ironic.
Saw this today about data security, and thought Ironic indeed.
------snip------
"There are major problems here.? The first is the threat to patient privacy? we have plenty of evidence that the government is ill-suited to handle large amounts of data and keep it secret." Indeed we do. Just this fall, in fact, HHS contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) breached the privacy of five million patients. Nor can we derive much comfort from the assurance, on page 12 of the rule, that the bureaucrats are now cognizant of "concerns related to consumer privacy." HHS learned so much from this error that it just awarded SAIC another $15 million contract.
The most ironic feature of this blunder, and the failure to learn from it, is that HHS is the federal agency charged with enforcing health privacy regulations in the private sector. Yes, this is the government agency that supposedly assures that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), whose primary provisions protect patient privacy, is followed to the letter by health care providers. And HHS routinely metes out punishment to hospitals and other entities that inadvertently lose patient data. Earlier this year, for example, it fined Massachusetts General Hospital $1 million because an employee lost 192 patient records on a commuter train. Nonetheless, the department has repeatedly demonstrated that it is incapable of living up to its own standards. The SAIC screw-up was by no means an isolated incident.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/10/17/wed-like-to-know-a-little-bit
